the eighth day
by The Musings of a Muse
Summary: The epiphany that her past self would be thinking these same thoughts if her future came to pass is striking. The tears come faster, knowing that she can't go home before she saves the world.


** It pains me to ask, but if you want to know where this came from, go read my other story **hurts the soul like apathy**. This is a fire extinguisher to that. Read THAT at your own risk. Also, read **she calls it agony **if you have time. I'm ridiculously proud of that short thing. Ok, enough shameless promotion; go read.**

** I don't own Fairy Tail. Which is DEFINITELY a good thing. Obviously.**

**~MM~**

**8.**

The eighth day dawns in a field, the sun rising sleepily, yawing above green meadows, no sign of destruction or carnage or only ten percent left.

When you walk into the field, a settled feeling sinking in your gut that feels like _complete_, she's there blinking the bright from her eyes. Her arm is back, the right one she showed so proudly and offered you whenever you ran. _A pact_, your mind whispers, _a pact to trust and live and run never away and always toward._

You can feel them come up at your back, just a bit farther that you; but then, they always were when it came to her; watching but not really seeing. Their excitement fills you, permeating the air, and all that resounds when you strain your ears is_ She's back! She's back! She's back!_

Her eyes focus on you and you turn out a hand, holding it out and remembering Day One. _Take my hand,_ you plead, knowing that she will, but it doesn't stop the fear from spawning in your stomach like butterflies from a height. Day Seven is too fresh to think anything otherwise and lay all contention to rest.

"Welcome home," you call out, the nights of nightmares and numbness and not caring because you're slightly more bitter than you should be about her saving the world and having to leave being washed out with _home_ and _total_ and _she's back_.

_How dare you leave,_ a part of you whispers, the one from late nights and too many bar stools and tears-that-are-vodka. _Don't leave me again,_ agonizes the part that realized the wrongs and couldn't find the rationale for it; that knew you should have cared and should have been proud and should have been OK with her being Fairy Tail to the end.

_What happened to being more fun when we're together?_

He's hushed, that little devil imp on your shoulder born of helplessness and death as only those can invoke. He's quieted by the hand slid into yours, very real and very soft, but not without callous and edge. You'd take her no other way. Day One comes back. You compare their hands and find that in the end, had you kept all your years and found one dragon instead of seven and never had watched her sacrifice all that was well and good left in the world, you would not have understood how treasured _this_ hand is.

_She's back,_ and the last ball of lingering black is immaculate in her presence once more. She is of the highest order, archaically sublime, and is blessed with earth in her eyes, good fortune in her name, and the star's wishes in her hair.

You tug her towards the rest, leaving your damned time-line and the saved one, where you're still alive and so is she and maybe she has one less rough patch of skin. You think yourself an unlucky bastard for never getting to see exactly what your girl is made of.

She built home with those hands, every single patch of rough a labor in love.

* * *

**7.**

The plan had been decided long before he'd ever gotten to open his mouth and Natsu, true to form, was having issues accepting it.

_It's simple, _they say, when he expresses doubts and voices worries, calling out the bits and pieces that go unstressed just because they shouldn't be, otherwise nothing will work, _it's so simple, Natsu, here this is how it goes:_

(he knows how it goes, knows it's not going to end _well, _or _good_, or even minutely _OK, _but he lets them explain it once more, hoping that he'll come up with some alternate scheme or that they'll see their follies or both)

_All of us are going to charge at the dragons; we have to get past Rogue to get to Eclipse, remember. _

(Natsu tallies up losses in his head. So many are gone already, and he ticks them off like one would pull splinters out from under one's skin – quickly, with a sneer, and a half-melancholic, half-self-loathing thought of _why did I think that was a good idea?_ They'll lose too many, one was too many when this all started, and everyone knows it, but they all gloss over it and carry on – fire-glazed eyes and roar-muffled ears can't hear much anyway – and all he can think is that there's _10,000 _dragons out there, plus their mind-controller, and that there's hardly enough people in the world to fill the old Fairy Tail building's lobby at this point.)

_The Dragon Slayers – Natsu, are you paying attention? You have one of the most important parts – are to be protected at all times. We're going to use Formation H – you all know which one that one is, right? – with the Slayers in the second to middle ring and––_

(here he tenses, hating and hating and hating that Erza is going to say it, going to use her like a weapon. Really, that's all it really boils down to; all his complaints and wry comments; his pointing out how utterly moronic this plan is and how they all know it's going to fail and everyone it going to die, because like all other missions of this sort, people will die – except this kind of mission has never been attempted, and things unknown = death for people running on routine.

And she's a weapon. He can't condone that. They're trying to turn her into something inhuman, without emotion and remorse and she's letting them – _why is she letting them? _When he could die and she could die and his bed is hers and _everyone is going to get slaughtered_, one would think she'd show a bit more than a cold nod with her thrice darkened eyes – once with shadow, another with the blood of her arm, and the last something new and something very final. _A last resort_, his mind scoffs, and he can't help but steal a glance at her. He thinks he might hate her, just a little bit, in that moment for being who she is and how she is and for joining Fairy Tail. She's self-sacrificing, she's a Celestial Mage, and she's pretty much adopted Fairy Tail's hero complex all on her own. She's going to die. And he hates her for that.)

_––Yukino and Lucy in the very center. They're needed to open up Eclipse so that Lucy can dive through and warn our past selves about the dragons and the princess about Eclipse. Lucy – Lucy won't be coming back_

(he hates how Erza chokes up a bit and ignores how his throat tightens, too. He hates Lucy right now, he has to remember that, or he'll never make it through tomorrow. Never make it through losing her forever.)

_so she'll leave her keys here for Yukino to make a contract with. That way, if – if the plan...fails...we can try again at – at a later date. _

(The last part is rushed and it's so unlike Erza and Natsu is just so in loathe with this _entire situation _that he can't really say that he hates anything in particular right now. Except Rogue, who killed Sting and Cobra and blinded Laxus. Who took Lucy's arm, broke most of Gajeel's bones once the Iron Dragon Slayer was unconscious, and gave Levy all those horrid scars on her face that boils everyone's blood. She's taken to hiding them under long bangs because the weight of being a _reminder _is often times too much to bear.)

The meeting adjourns, then, and Natsu keeps trying to make himself hate, despise, scorn, and detest Lucy with everything he has, but she comes and lays a shaking hand on his shoulder, voice small as she asks whether or not he'll be coming to bed that night (he hasn't in a long time, trying to make himself condemn her for the weight he can't take off her shoulders). When he looks into her eyes, they're four layers shallower than he remembers and he likes to think that he can see the exact shade of home and hearth that used to be there before there was none.

He can't bring himself to hate her. Instead, he'll hate himself. He's supposed to save her, die for her, live for her, make her happy, and protect her. Supposed to take the burdens from her life. Instead, all he can do is take her hand, leading her in a slower, much more sedate mockery of Day One, and hold her all night, whispering in her ears between bouts of dozing and half-crazed kisses everything that he's ever thought about her. Everything that he's ever wanted to do for her, to her, and with her. He knows he's not the only one trying to get everything out (because everyone _knows _they're going to die, but he doesn't want to contemplate that while Lucy is still very much alive next to him), out before the end, but he doesn't let her get a word in edgewise.

He can't hate her. Can't treat her with contempt, can't tell her with crass indecency that everything was a lie, he can't and he won't because she deserves _so much better_. Deserves the entire world – one not damned, one not ugly, and he tells her so, again and again against her skin and just over her ears. He cannot hate her.

But by the time morning comes, he hopes that he's empty.

(the next day comes; the plan is executed. He was right, everybody was right, and they all die. But Lucy made it through, and he's entirely numb, so Natsu supposes it might not have been a total failure.)

* * *

**6.**

Day Six is a happier day. One before the dragons and chaos and death. They don't know what's coming, can't even dream of it, and it's so much better that way.

It is also, unfortunately, the day that Future Lucy arrives. Her bones ache from battle, her magic is tainted dark and heavy – pushed as far from her as possible – and the phantom pains that she swore to Natsu were gone run up where her arm should have been. It's the cold, she reasons, even though it's uncharacteristically hot for July.

She knows no one's left, somehow, and seeing them all so not-ravanged and not-unhopeful is a torturous thing that makes tears cut down her skin. So she watches Natsu fight, remembers sitting in the infirmary with his promise cradled in her heart, and wishes that she had died and the plan had failed so that she could have stayed with _her _family. Because these people are cheerful and optimistic and never-losing. She wishes that she didn't have to carry the weight of the world on her shoulders – hasn't she done enough, been through enough? – but then death comes back to her with gaping maws and glinting, moon-struck talons. The epiphany that her past self would be thinking these same thoughts if her future came to pass is striking.

The tears come faster, knowing that she can't go home before she saves the world.

* * *

**5.**

Day Five is a day of reckoning.

It's walking into Mercurius Castle and taking a deep breath, thinking and not thinking about what's in the basement; trying not to let the skeletons rattling at all the door knobs in the castle remind her that the halls whisper secrets like her mind whispers names. Because she's always tripping over their names at the most inopportune times, she'll freeze and remember them as they were before and then as the were at present; though her present has nothing to do at all with games and magical power; her present is all blood and gore and who-rules-the-world. Lucy shoves them to the back of her mind. She tells them to speak there, and speak at night, and to become nightmares and not day dreams.

The castle is all greens. Jades and emeralds, sea foam and grass, living things and green rocks that are butter under the edge of a dragon's claw.

(She remembers, suddenly, the scene overlaying what she's looking at in monotone grays, when humanity thought that the gems would protect them, when humanity thought that the castle, discarded as a structure of power, could be picked up as a safe haven. It couldn't be. The earth has no protection from the sky.

The names whisper again: _Elfman, Freed, Max, Reedus, Macao, Mira. _Lucy doesn't want to remember dying in a faux place of living greenery. So she shouts at them _go back to sleep _and let her deal with what must be dealt with so she can sleep, too.)

When she calls out for Hisui, it's just Hisui; not princess, or Your Highness, or Your Majesty. Lucy knew Fiore E. Hisui as Hisui: Woman Without Country, Princess Without Crown, and Jaded By Life.

Jade couldn't save them. Maybe Hisui's name comes out slick with blood off of Lucy's tongue, and maybe the guards hear the malice, because most of them are sizing her up like blood for blood will wipe away whatever she's thinking. Lucy is only interested in this Hisui for her power though; she doesn't dwell on the fact that her past self would be inexplicably sympathetic for the princess right now. The Lucy from the future only feels the burn of cauterized nerves at the end of her shoulder, only sees glass houses tumbling down and down and crash that last night. She only thinks, picking at an empty key ring, that sometimes people need to be used for their power because that's all they're really ever good for.

She wishes she could tell her past self that she's not one of those people, don't open the door, don't be a hero, and don't save the world, but Hisui _is _one of those people, so Lucy feels a whole lot better revealing the future to a pawn rather than the queen.

She tells Hisui about the dragons, doesn't mention the jade castle falling, and tells Hisui about the darkness that lurks inside the good in the world. Hisui asks her if this is all about Eclipse, almost sounds like she already _knows _what's going to happen, and Lucy wants to shake her bones right from under her skin. She's too late. Too late to warn. The shadows beat her here. So Lucy says not a word about the gate, nothing about how she came here and not how it works or can work. If the woman is half what she thinks she is, trying to change the past and gather magic power without mages' consent, then Lucy thinks she should be smart enough to figure out a truth and a lie.

The princess doesn't believe her, and Lucy says _Of course you don't_. She sneers when she tells Hisui the outcome of the Grand Magic Games.

She's only glad later that her voice didn't drip with _this is what you've done _and _you don't know what the world is _later, when she sees Natsu again and pulls off her hood, begging for help. She's glad then, too, that the poorly named princess couldn't see her malevolent lips with her hood pulled over her eyes.

Day Five is a day of reckoning; Lucy speaks all truths out loud, and keeps the lies locked inside. The only thing she permits herself to realize is that she's entirely too jaded and maybe she was a bit harsh, but she doesn't let herself feel remorse.

* * *

**4.**

Day Four is when her luck finally runs out. When she sees Natsu, young and unscathed, and with eyes that still look at her from far away, it's everything she can do not to kiss him and say _never change, never change, please don't ever change. _At the same time, he's not hers and she is taken aback by the revulsion she feels towards him.

Here is not the man that held her throughout their last night. Here is not the man who would look at her like she was the world and the world was ending. Here is not the man that covered her eyes and said _don't look, you can't look _when the battle settled down and rusty water, lifeblood, covered streets and windows and bodies were left for carrion birds. Here is not the man she loved.

Here is a boy.

And Lucy looks at herself, her past self, and thinks _here is a girl _and she wonders how in the world days feel like centuries and why she suddenly feels so tired. Here are two teenagers, not even two decades old, separated by two days and a life time. Lucy suddenly can't remember if she's eighteen, seventeen, or eighty-eight.

She whispers in his ear when she wakes up over his shoulder _kiss her before she's gone _and then doesn't say another word as Rogue, the Rogue from her time line, takes the world in darkness.

It sounds perfect, silver words flowing off a silver tongue; a plan laid out in platinum that is unbreakable and fired against the kind of flames Natsu breathes. Two ways to use Eclipse. Two ways to defeat the ten thousand dragons.

_I'm so tired._

Two ways to get back home and to her family; two ways to die and one is faster than the other.

She sees the boy again in Natsu, the one that trusts and is easy to throw about the word _nakama. _Someone quick to trust and quicker to protect, someone looking for the good in people – that's when Lucy realizes that Rogue can't be good. Her gut twists up on itself, pushing against the top of her throat and tingling the back of her tongue. She swallows hard, then swallows again; she doesn't know whether to puke, cry, or scream but she really wants to do all three.

Her Natsu doesn't trust. Her Natsu would have thrown his arm out and pushed her back, would have glared and made sure he stood in front of her and growled out _who the hell are you? w_hile discreetly sliding back his feet, back to freedom and back towards what he knows because what he doesn't will kill him, and then kill her.

The need for something _she _knows is so strong that for a minute, she's lost in remembering the cold stones under the blankets, and the soft glow of the night watch's lantern. She's stuck remembering, waiting, for him to come back from walking out around the city, looking for survivors and people who he knew when they were alive. She's not breathing when she lays on that cot made of things she knows she has to do (she needs to sleep, needs to eat, needs to survive); she holds her breath for as long as she can until her heart hammers in her ears and she can't hear, can't think, and can almost pretend he's there with her. That her heart is his, beating like it is under her ears. She's lost in the feeling of the steady ache in her chest, the fingers that dance along the tortured burn of her arm, and the knowledge that then and now, he won't come back to lay down with her and turn her cot of needs into a bed of wants.

_I'm so tired._

She's been lucky all her life. Lucky Lucy Heartfilia. Lucky Lucy of Fairy Tail. Lucky Lucy. She's noticed the hidden magic in a renowned author's book, she's used Virgo to save the day only weeks after she received the key just like it was something meant to be. She managed to defeat Sherry on Galuna Island and still take a Zodiac Key as a reward. Her guild saved her when her father demanded her back. She changed the Celestial Spirit King's mind; changed a law and saved Leo the Lion, a _nakama _named Loke. She reached Juvia through her mind-control and was one of the first to perform a Unison Raid. She beat Bickslow at his own game. She was able to perform Urano Meteria and save Aries, ending Loke's heartache. She somehow avoided being turned into a lacrima in Edolas, and was one of the only mages from Earthland still able to use her magic. She literally ran into Natsu with Kain running after her; and that just might have saved her life.

And maybe it was some sort of serendipity that snapped her back to attention, some sort of fortune that made her react faster than she could process, and it was definitely luck that sent her back home.

Even if it was on the blade of an enemy she was supposed to destroy.

(But technically, even as her luck ran out, it continued; her past self would live, would do the right thing, and now Lucy knew that Natsu would hunt future Rogue down to the ends of the Earth to make sure he paid.)

_Come home, _the voices whisper to her, _come rest._

So she closes her eyes and drifts to sleep.

* * *

**3.**

The Third Day is all about drifting. Well, drifting and remembering.

There's one memory that sticks out. Really, just one, and maybe it's because it was the most pain she'd felt in a while, or maybe it's because that's when she and Natsu really realized that living without the other would be hell.

She can't remember what day it was, can't remember how many days after the initial attack it happened, all she remembers is someone screaming out

("Ambush! Ambush! Run! Get away! Get underground! The dragons are back, they're _back, _they're here–!" and then nothing, because the man who warned was the last to run and in that world it was run first, warn last.)

and then she locked eyes with Natsu, who had just come skidding around the corner of the plaza where the survivors has congregated. His eyes were blown wide, small_small _irises around small_small _pupils because one's eyes didn't need to be big to take in the scene. He just needed to see her, and that was all he saw.

Lucy didn't need to look behind her to know that she was going to die. His body said it all. His shoulders tensed, arms bracing near his ribs, ready to reach, scoop, snatch her away from the maw of the thing bearing down from above. His legs dug into the already ruined cobblestones, muscles contorting and twitching as he decided whether or not he should jump at her, if it was worth trying to save her, who was three seconds from death, or if it would be better to jump at the beast that ate her as it flew away. She saw it on his face, the resignation and the ashes of what never could be, saw the living drop out of his eyes and though it was cruel, so cruel, for his name to trip from her lips, tears already gathering before the syllables had even fallen. It was a breathy thing, too, full of rewards on missions, summer nights spent on the roof of her apartment, rock-paper-scissors for riding trains or walking feet, two a.m. conversations after nightmares, and a heart full of yearning. A life time left unfulfilled.

She knows he hears her when his lungs expand to the point she thinks they might burst and she's momentarily hopeful and terrified that he's going to come with her, but a second later all she can process is pain and _oh look, I tripped _then it's over, the teeth are gone, taking her arm with it. And she doesn't feel the ground, doesn't feel the stone, because all she feels is _hell _where her arm should be.

It's hotter than Natsu's flames have ever been and distantly, Lucy knows that her body is still pushing blood to where her limb no longer is, and that it probably shouldn't do that, because there's _nothing there now _but that's way too much thinking and doing and acting and _there's nothing there now, it's gone, it's gone, and I'm alive, and there's nothing there – kill me, kill me! Why didn't it kill me! I want to be dead!_ There's nothing beyond screaming in her ears, the rushing of blood that shouldn't go there, please come back, don't go there, _there's nothing there_, and she's hot and cold all over. She can't feel her feet, can't feel her knees or her fingers, but every nerve on her arm is electrified and _why isn't she dead yet? Can't anyone hear her screaming? Let her die, let her die, let her die!_

She doesn't stop screaming until there's blood in her throat and she's choking and she for a minute terror grips her again, diffusing into hysteria that makes everything in her tense like a pulled back rubber band: _is something else missing? Did it come back to finish me? Finish me, finish me! Stop what you started! _

Someone lifts up her shoulders and she stars screaming again because _there's nothing there, nothing there and don't touch it! It's ugly and deformed and gone! It's gone and it hurts! How can something so gone hurt so much?! _They pound her back and she coughs and coughs and gasps, crying and screaming intermittently until there's enough noise filtering back into her, enough feeling other than what should be there and isn't to realize that Natsu's hands are on her face, that his eyes are two eyelash lengths away from hers and that he's speaking, but she still can't hear him over the thoughts in her head that scream in agony and then her lungs collapse under her – _shock, _she thinks, and she knows that's a bad thing but she can't quite remember why because the pain is aching now throughout her body and it's bearable when it's not concentrated and _oh, that feels so much better and I'm so tired. _Natsu's grip on her face tightens, his eyes still small_small _like they were before, but now they're watery until he wipes it away, burdened eyebrows straightening out under something she can't name and he turns to someone else – she guesses it's someone else, he certainly isn't talking to her – and she hears something that filters through the static in her ears and the sleepy, languid film over her mind and it sounds a lot like _hold her down._

He whispers something else, eyes pinching at the corners, before she's screaming again and every nerve in her is torn from her shock's protection. Her eyes stretch open, wider and wider and widewide_wide, _she's dying ten thousand deaths again and she can't tell if she's screaming anymore because there's more blood in her throat and she thinks that she's more drowning than anything. Drowning and burning at the same time. The smell of charring flesh makes her stomach roil and she's heaving against the arms on her whole shoulder and stomach and thighs, knees, and feet, but it doesn't do any good. Black spots dance in front of her eyes, fuzzing and building up around the outside until she can only see a straight shot into the sky, where the stars blur across into a line, dividing the sky, and the clouds blotch out huge splotches until all she can see is white and gray and midnight black––

––then it's over and she's left convulsing, cold_hot_cold_hot _all at once and thinking _I should've died, I shouldn't be alive, am I dead? Why aren't I dead? _Before Natsu's head falls under her chin, lips moving against her pulse, whispering _I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. _His eyes filter back in, the dead things beating out the living things, and it makes sense. She's whispering _it's ok, it's ok _without knowing if she's making a sound as she feels his tears roll back behind her neck.

* * *

**2.**

Day Two is wondering.

_Does he miss me?_

_ Does he remember me?_

_ Is he waiting?_

_ Is everyone there?_

_ When will I see them?_

_ Can I even go meet them?_

_ I wonder if there's a heaven._

_ Has he been waiting?_

_ I wonder when I'll see them._

Day two is wondering in black nothing without a body and with an arm and she isn't sure how that works, but everything she's ever lost is waiting and wondering with her; everything she's ever had is waiting _for_ her. Some things are one in the same.

* * *

**1.**

Day One is seventeen and Hargeon Town and Love Charms and salve traders and not-finding-Igneel. It's him saving her and her saving him and her talking and him sort of listening and both of them thinking _this person is so weird _but only Natsu saying it out loud.

Day One is a flying blue cat and a pissed off Aquarius and her going with him and him pulling her. It's both of them thinking _I wouldn't mind being around them more _and neither one saying it.

The first day ends with fire over the sea and the military between buildings, the sun is laughing as it hides its smile under the curve of the earth and the moon peeks out to see what the fuss is all about. The stars roll their eyes and watch their lucky child and airborne dragon fly off to a future that they'll see and that is different from the doomed line and the fixed one. Day One is closure and beginning and impatience and disappointment and it doesn't change.

Day One is Natsu and Lucy: starting to care, not yet knowing, and thinking of nothing but the moment they have.

(And this time, their weeks run in seven days and twenty-four hours. They live above the ground and some of the nightmares never surface at two in the morning. This time, Natsu doesn't need someone from the future to tell him to kiss her; he kisses her – just a peck – under the stars that love her and he watches them shine bright back in her eyes when she smiles and kisses him back, both arms wrapping around his neck as he grins his fanged tooth grin, hooking her lips and making her pull at his hair while he laughs. This time, he whispers sorry for an entirely different reason, and she forgives him because she never really minded, anyway.)

**~MM~**

** Ow. Ok. That kind of hurt to write. But I like it, so it was a labor of love. Frankly, I'm surprised more stories about how Lucy lost her arm aren't running around places. Maybe they are and I just haven't seen them.**

** Tell me if you find anything wrong with it – grammar wise, spelling wise, tense wise, ect. **

** R&amp;R, please?**


End file.
